Wednesday, January 06, 2016

When Good Screenwriters Become Missing Persons

(Note: An abridged version of
this essay first appeared in the magazine Gilbert several years ago.)

When it debuted in 2002, Without A Trace (WAT)was a highly
entertaining and well-acted drama about a fictional FBI Missing Persons Unit.
In its second season, the series matured brilliantly into one of the best
series on television. The dynamism that propelled the freshman and sophomore
years dulled a bit in the still-often-decent third and fourth seasons, but
midway through the fourth season, the clever plotting and subtle character
development began a slow and heartbreaking disintegration. Despite occasional
brief resurgences, by the time WAT
was cancelled after its seventh season, it was an emaciated shadow of its
former self, yet it always could have easily returned to greatness.

An exceptional ensemble cast made
the show sparkle. Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia) starred as the
hard-and-sharp-as-nails director who couldn’t save his crumbling personal life.
Samantha Spade (Poppy Montgomery), Vivian Johnson (Marianne Jean-Baptiste),
Danny Taylor (Enrique Murciano), and Martin Fitzgerald (Eric Close) rounded out
the cast. Every episode provided a little insight into each character’s life
and mentality, sometimes through throwaway lines, sometimes through heartfelt
monologues. By the second and third seasons, intense character arcs such as the
past relationship between Jack and Sam, the budding relationship between Sam
and Martin, Danny’s bond with his estranged convict brother, Martin and
Vivian’s reactions to a fatal shooting, and Jack’s family issues all
contributed to creating real and sympathetic characters. There was a solid
sense that the writers knew everything about these characters’ pasts and
psychology, and were gradually and skillfully revealing these details to the
audience.

In the fourth season, the carefully
crafted character development began to unravel. A sixth detective was added to
the cast: Elena Delgado (Rosalyn Sanchez); and her presence would appeal to
some fans and put off others. Unfortunately, heavy attention on her character
meant that the rest of the supporting cast often received short thrift. This
was especially sad in Vivian’s case. Jean-Baptiste was by far the show’s
strongest actress, but she was frequently and cruelly shortchanged, sometimes
getting as little as three or four lines an episode.

Furthermore, after the fourth
season, the adroit character storylines fell apart. Some plots, such as
Vivian’s health problems and Martin’s painkiller addiction, were introduced
with great dramatic fanfare, played up for a half-dozen episodes, and then
abruptly dropped, referenced in a fifth season episode, and then completely
abandoned. Continuity regarding character development disintegrated. During the
final three seasons, Vivian, Danny, and Martin’s characters were rarely
developed at all, and their connections to the other cast members were largely
severed.

Vivian began as Jack’s longtime confidante,
but the writers made them drift apart. Danny and Martin started the show as
antagonistic rivals, but soon won each other over and became best buddies.
Their banter added humor to the show, but by the last two seasons their rapport
was kicked offscreen. A romance between Danny and Elena started in the fifth
season, went unmentioned in season six, and was then abruptly brought back in
season seven. The growing attraction between Martin and Sam featured
prominently in the first two seasons, then moved from rocky secret relationship
to breakup to a sibling-like connection over the next three seasons. In season
seven? You’d barely know that they were even friends at work, given their maybe
ten minutes of screen time together the whole final season.

Aside from some disproportionate
time spent on Elena, only the leads received much attention in seasons six and
seven. The integration of Montgomery’s real-life pregnancy and boyfriend into
the plot derailed her connections to the rest of the cast. Revelations
regarding Sam’s past were mishandled badly, and the on-again, off-again
relationship between Jack and Sam was one-tenth-heartedly resumed in the final
season, botched, and settled blandly in the finale. Worst of all, Jack Malone
was originally a detective who specialized in psychological insight and mental
tactics, but the later seasons turned him into a knockoff of Jack Bauer. Where
the Jack of the early seasons cracked suspects by finding the chinks in their
mental armor, the Jack of the later seasons turned to guns and threats of
violence in order to get information.

The series had its share of rotten
apples even during its glory days. Some episodes, such as one that presented
Catholic officials as sinister and surreptitious, one with a speech declaring
that “abortion is a Christian act,” a horribly misguided one-off attempt to
play the show as a comedy involving agoraphobic lesbians, and one disturbing
ending that attempted to romanticize ritual murder would be enough to put
potential viewers off the show completely if they saw any of these episodes
first.

Although the show could plunge to
disturbing depths, it could also ascend to magnificent heights. The early
seasons were full of gems, including a three-episode arc involving a predatory
headmaster who became Jack’s arch-nemesis. In another classic episode, a pair
of identical twins, one innocent, one guilty, became suspects in a
disappearance, and the team had to determine culpability. Two open-ended
episodes, one involving a convicted killer on death row, the other attacking
media bias on racial issues, managed to make their ambiguous finales compelling
rather than merely frustrating. A desperate father (Charles S. Dutton, in an Emmy-winning
performance) attempting to find the son who had been kidnapped years earlier
made for some of the series’ most poignant moments. Other treasures involved a
hostage crisis connected to 9/11, an overachieving high school student vainly
trying to hide a secret, the emotional fallout from Jack’s disintegrating
family life, and a storyline revolving around Jack’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted
father (Martin Landau). Arguably the series’ finest moment was “Wannabe,” a
second-season masterpiece about a missing boy and the hell that peer pressure
and adolescent bullying can create.

During the latter half of the
show’s run, truly great episodes became nonexistent. The surprising twists
faded as pedestrian, cookie-cutter episodes proliferated, and the subtle glimpses
at the characters’ personal lives devolved into soap opera. The actors did the
best they could with flat dialogue, and indeed, the show’s woes were
attributable almost entirely to the writers. A show about finding missing
persons is different from a show about solving murders. With a disappearance,
the missing person can be found alive and well, be murdered, or never be
located. What is crucial is that the viewer care
about the victims and want them to be found or avenged.

In a murder, it’s O.K. if the viewer feels
nothing more than a passing twinge of pity for a corpse, but in a missing
persons case, not caring whether or not the individual in question is ever
found means the whole episode falls flat. The first few seasons created missing
persons the viewer could sympathize with or at least be interested in. When
they were rescued, the viewers cheered; when they were dead, the viewers cried.
The last few seasons? When you have missing persons like dental floss– about as
close to being one-dimensional as you can get– there’s no impetus for watching
the show. As opposed to the glory days when you hoped that a war veteran or
schizophrenic girl would come home safe, the mediocre episodes could have
pulled more heartstrings by kidnapping a coatrack.

Clichés also crippled the series.
You can only hear the line “(Name of
supposed parent) isn’t (Name of
child)’s real father!” so many times before you want to throw a footstool
at the screen. A little imagination could have provided dozens of original
reasons for a person to willingly vanish, or ways to hide a body, or at least
create some suitably hateful villains. By season seven, the family reunion
scenes had the punch of a geriatric arthritic boxer, the viewer knew that
would-be saints always had a dark secret in their past, that if the missing
person was accused of a crime that someone else was probably responsible, and
that if the missing person turned his back on another character in the final
flashback scenes that he would be murdered approximately one-eighth of a second
later. Most of the later episodes weren’t bad so much as unoriginal.Careful examination of the last few seasons
shows that most of the later episodes fall into one of approximately three main
templates, without any twists worth mentioning.

All these complaints disguise the
fact that WAT’s early seasons were so
engaging, suspenseful, clever, emotionally involving without being
manipulative, and psychologically well-rounded. After a long delay after disappointing sales
for seasons one and two, the last five seasons were also released on DVD.Despite the decline in quality, the show
didn’t deserve cancellation. With better scripts to motivate the cast, WAT could easily have been rejuvenated
into stellar television. As it is, one can only hope that the cast finds new
projects worthy of their talents.

1 comment:

Sometimes older Female Graphic Novel are revived by a fixed or movable upright partition used to divide a room and a person who has written a particular text and directors rather than publishing houses.